The philosophy informing my approach to learning and knowledge management

Learning any subject deeply requires us to come back to material we've read and make sense of it in our own words. It requires us to elaborate on what we've read. It requires what many call 'spaced repetition', where concepts and ideas that we've elaborated on in our own words re-emerge over and over again for us to be confronted with these same concepts and ideas in different contexts (this process also resembles how we build our sense of identity and self – cf. Douglas Hofstadter's 'I Am a Strange Loop'). As a whole, it requires a profoundly different foundation for how we approach learning.

Where hierarchy and linearity guide conventional approaches to learning and knowledge management, I encourage and employ a more wandering approach. Nora Bateson refers to this wandering approach as an 'Ecology of Mind', where your learning process becomes:

... a garden of thoughts growing, changing, dying, and even composting in relation to one another. It is a dirt-under-your-nails transference of biological patterns onto conceptual and epistemological habits. 'An Ecology of Mind,' as a term, is a thinking tool that allows ideas to be flexible and alive in relation to one another and the outside world.

– Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, 2016, p. 20-21

Culturally, we've come to believe that the realm of thought and the realm of nature are separate, but if you take time to bring awareness to your thought patterns (through practices like critical reflection, engagement of your sociological imagination, and mindfulness meditation), you begin to see how thoughts and consciousness deeply resemble ecological processes. We may feel more comfortable when information is separated into neat categories like topics, modules, subjects, disciplines, etc. But this comfort comes more from our educational conditioning than it does from a sense of how one actually learns.

Learning requires us to make meaningful connections across subjects and contexts, not just within them. It also requires us to take a reflective stance on our own thought processes to identify how our thoughts are either opening us up to new possibilities or holding us back.

The term ' An Ecology of Mind' challenges me to ask myself: which thoughts are flourishing, which are composting, which are just budding, which are ready for harvesting? Also, I might ask myself, is this idea a seedling for a future learning, or a weed? What are the stimuli that came together to produce this idea?